On 26th January, my piece here assumed that Putin probably intended to invade Ukraine and that the only response available to the West was a package of massive, severe and crippling sanctions against Russia. And so it has turned out to be. Any lesser response would by the US, NATO, the EU and Pacific region democracies, I wrote, would jeopardise the entire international order. Putin never intended compromise.
Now that the Russian invasion is a reality, such a response must follow. The sanctions regime on Iran is severe; Putin must endure at least the same. What has been initially announced is wholly inadequate, as Bill Browder, the champion of Magnitsky laws, has already pointed out.
The West has leverage of a massive kind. The issue is whether it is disposed to use that leverage in a united and concerted way. Sanctioning named senior figures in the extended Russian kleptocracy will not hurt Putin or his domestic popularity.
Serious sanctions, including exclusion from economic, banking and currency markets and institutions would hurt. So would freezing of Russian-owned assets, including deposits, shares, property and investments. Revocation of travel and residency rights for expatriate oligarchs, their families and their associates will bite. Prohibition of trading in strategic goods and commodities backed by extraterritorial sanctioning of sanction-busters can have a real effect.
The feather-duster approach apparent so far seems ineffectual. We have seen weakness and timidity in Western responses to poisonings and assassinations. The UK’s noisy but weak response to Skrypal and Salisbury was clearly influenced by the City of London’s appetite for Russian capital and investments.
Massive reduction in diplomatic engagement, and reduction of embassy staffs to skeletal proportions seems appropriate. The Russian embassy in Dublin should be severely cut back – not expanded.
After the hi-jacking of the Ryanair flight to Minsk and the shooting down of the Malaysian airliner over the Donbas region – both done by Putin’s glove-puppets – reductions in international air traffic are more than justified.
The Ukrainian democracy deserves such a response. Nothing less will do. Even now, clarity on such matters might yet prevent widespread slaughter and mass evacuations by refugees.
As I wrote in January, this is the ultimate test for Joe Biden. Is he up to this challenge? Is the US willing to lead? Is NATO willing to follow?
If not, the outlook for Georgia, the Caucasus, the Balkans, the Baltics and Poland and Rumania is clouded.
Listening to Putin’s rambling exposition of the arguments for the non-existence of an independent, sovereign Ukraine, I had to pinch myself. Ukraine, a soviet socialist republic, was, along with the Byelorussian SSR, made a founding sovereign-state member of the United Nations in 1945 on the representation that each of those states enjoyed sovereign freedom to secede from the USSR!
Ukraine has remained a separate, sovereign, founding member-state of the United Nations from the inception of that organisation for nearly 75 years exactly on that basis. That suited Russia under Stalin, Khruschev, Brezhnev, Gorbachev and Putin.
Now Ukraine has no right to a separate democratic existence – because its elimination now equally suits Russia – Ukraine has now been relegated to an invention of Lenin and Stalin – a fiction. It is now a Russian land – as Russian as the Baltic states, Finland and Stalin’s own birthplace, Georgia. The implications of Putin getting away with this invasion are obvious for them.
The consequence of the Putin invasion must be a re-commencement of the Cold War freeze-out of Russia. The Russian economy is fundamentally weak. Its supplies of natural gas and oil can be obtained elsewhere. Ending Nordstream is only a start.
Diplomacy has signally failed. The era of Perestroika and Deng’s economic transformation of China have yielded place to monstrous totalitarianism and brazen kleptocracy in close alliance. We have got to get this picture into clear perspective.
If that alliance is to be the coming world order, we are entering a dark and dangerous phase of history – with many echoes of what our parents’ and grandparents’ generations beheld in its frightening reality.
It is no consolation remembering that the politically ugly Donald Trump emboldened Putin and Xi by his politically illiterate approach to his allies, to NATO, Canada, and the EU. His re-election would solve nothing.
The Democrats in America must prove what they are made of now. In Europe, we must show real unity of purpose. Macron was used by Putin to test Western resolve. Boris Johnson and Liz Truss were side-lined by events. Germany now seems to grasp that energy dependence on Putin comes with a terrible price.
The EU has economic strength which can be used to impose sanctions with real teeth and withstand retaliation to persuade all Russians that invading Ukraine comes with a heavy price for their short, medium and long-term well-being and happiness, and that Putin is the person who will make them pay that price.